Tackling youth unemployment in East-Central Europe

This paper draws upon evidence from survey research in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia to describe how young people's old routes into the labour markets in East-Central Europe have disintegrated in the 1990s while new routes and career groups have been created. A typology of these new routes is constructed and is then used to explain how and why levels of youth unemployment have risen and refuse to fall even in countries where, according to official economic statistics, recovery is now well-advanced, and despite the introduction of active labour market measures. It is concluded that levels of youth unemployment will subside, and prevent the creation of excluded groups, only if the development of the new market economies is managed.